Have you ever tried picking up where you left off… 20 years ago?
I began, Sport: American Style, a short story collection 20 years ago, but other projects took its place. This summer, I submitted one of the two stories I had completed to an anthology featuring stories set in Greater Los Angeles as Finish Line happened to be set in Los Angeles.
It was selected and the Made in L.A. anthology will be published in Spring 2022. I am already planning the stories but won’t begin writing them until summer 2022.
Athletic Drive
What drives individuals to persist fascinates me. Athletic drive. Entrepreneurial drive. Creative drive. Advocacy drive. I have had exposure to them all, but mostly to athletic drive. How much is wiring? How much is discipline? How much is opportunity?
Youth sports have been monetized. Professional sports have evolved into an empire.
More than sports journalism
The stories, previously published in Sports Illustrated, within Gary Smith’s Beyond the Game, leave me breathless. His writing style, his storytelling, transcends narrative non-fiction and reads better than fiction. The quote below is excerpted from a succinct, spot-on Publisher’s Weekly review that’s worth checking out as it provides inspiration for writing authentically as well as compellingly.
“…Smith finds the same zeal at the high-school level, as in the tale of Jonathan Takes Enemy, a one-time high-school basketball star nearly destroyed by drink and yet determined to make it as a college player. Some of Smith’s stories aren’t about winners at all but about those others who are lured in by their love of the game.”
Green lights vs. red lights
A number of years ago, after umpteen rejections, I stopped submitting my various short stories to literary journals. After reading some of the most prestigious ones, I came to the conclusion that my voice wasn’t literary enough. I’m simply not capable of writing an entire page describing someone walking across the kitchen and musing existentially as they make their way to the refrigerator.
I remember reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice the summer after 4th grade and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina on my own in 9th grade, but James Joyce was assigned freshman year in my English lit class, I was in pain. I made it through the class, but I knew I couldn’t take any more. Obviously, James Joyce moves a lot of readers, but it’s torture to have to read something you cannot at all relate to.
Although my B.A. in journalism never translated into a full-time career as a journalist, it has been relatively easy to pick up decent freelance assignments. After college, my focus was screenwriting for a number of years until I had children. The best class I took, an intense six-week screenwriting class in Santa Monica taught me a lot of writing techniques such as, how to briefly plot cause and effect scene to scene and to jump to the next scene when you run out of steam on the current scene. The instructor pointed out that often when you went back to the scene, you realize that the scene is done.
This training earned me much-coveted semi-finalist status in the second screenwriting contest I entered years ago, the Chesterfield Film Writer’s Project (which is no longer around). However, working full-time, raising children, writing on the side, and navigating the film world proved to be too much.
I met a young Australian film producer at a writing conference who went 50/50 with me on my reality TV treatment. When I’m feeling strongly about something, the ideas flow and take shape pretty quickly. Some story somewhere about female young adult industry performers really got to me, and my show was to transform them into straight jobs. He lived in L.A. and was shopping other projects and would shop it. I would write it. He almost got us a deal.
There’s challenging yourself, and then there is going against your grain. To be given so many green lights in other writing arenas and constant red lights by literary journals told me to stop submitting to them.
Former mayor of Stockton Michael Tubbs gave a recent interview to the Los Angeles Times regarding his new memoir The Deeper the Roots. He talks about learning from rejection, “‘Nos’ are such a gift,” he says. “Not the ‘no’ in and of itself, but what you learn from the ‘no.’”
Story collection became more focused
When my short story got accepted into the Made in LA anthology, it helped me to focus Sport: American Style, because the story that was selected involved a young adult Olympic sprinter from Los Angeles. Although I had completed another story for the collection about a broken-hearted newspaper editor who quits his job to become a ski bum, and had others sketched out, it made me realize I have the most lived experience by far with youth, teen, and college sports.
Teen and young adult athletes
Short stories depict turning points and their aftermaths. Many turning points present themselves to athletes as they develop. The newly released movie, King Richard, offers plenty of turning points for unlikely tennis sensations Venus and Serena Williams as they are coached by their father. The highly regarded movie takes them from toddlers through their early teens.
My stories are character-driven and message-driven. Characters are often inspired by chit-chats with strangers. I get inspired by a snippet of their experience and then make up a story that reflects the essence of who they are and their experience. I also get ideas from news stories.
Quoting again from the Publisher’s Weekly review as to the genius of writer Gary Smith, “…how he is able to capture and reveal the small, unexpected details that make or unmake a life.” I aspire to capture those “small, unexpected details” too.
Story of the goat
Who knew there was such a thing as a dog park? My 12-year-old daughter did. After seven years of begging for a dog, she tricked me into adopting an adorable 16-pound one-year-old dog, and then she escorted us to a huge nearby dog park open until midnight.
That was several years ago. I don’t know of any other place where one can come across individuals from so many walks of life. Once in a while, the snippet of a life story I hear during jagged walks spent monitoring dogs roughhousing with each other sticks with me.
For example, one evening I chatted with a twenty-something who waitresses at a vegan restaurant. She told me she became a vegan in junior high when she went to a fair. She stopped to gaze at a goat, and the goat communicated with her. She felt befriended, and knew right then and there she could never eat meat again.
We shared a passion for the environment, and this young woman taught me about shampoo bars that are packaged in cardboard, B12 spray to complement a vegan diet, and egg substitutes.
What did she learn from me? Not much!
Her story about the goat stayed with me, and I imagine somehow I will weave it into a character in a story… perhaps, the girlfriend of an athlete, the daughter of an athlete, or the athlete going vegan and shaking up those around her.